Elements

The Surprising Place Where Text Content Is Thriving: Video in a Mobile-First World

Audiences today are spending a lot of time on their smartphones. And with video's popularity on the rise on social media, people are watching a lot of video content also on mobile.

Marketers have to adapt their video marketing approach to account for the shift in consumer behavior.

In this article, I will offer tactical advice for marketers to make the most of a mobile-first world.

Text-Reliant Social Videos

Remember when Facebook's main form of content was text-based status updates? Over time, the feed slowly became photo-centric. Now it's evolved into an unlikely hybrid of the previous two incarnations: Text-reliant video content has proliferated on Facebook's News Feed. These are videos that need text to tell its story. They work with the sound off and on a smaller screen.

Here is one such video, by Billboard Magazine. Without the words, it would just be random video footage.

The dominance of this type of video content in the feed has everything to do with major social networks' being accessed primarily on mobile. Facebook has nearly 2 billion monthly mobile users, and Snapchat and Instagram are designed especially for mobile. If video is going to work on social media (and, by extension, on mobile), it has to work even when people are stealthily watching it during a train ride or in a meeting or wherever else they might be watching videos on mobile.